Recent Features

Diablo 3 Developer Live Chat: Full TranscriptAs promised last week, three Reaper of Souls developers, Travis Day, Wyatt Cheng, and John Yang joined CM Nevalistis for a live chat this afternoon @ 4pm PDT. The whole chat went 90 minutes and covered more than 50 questions, and you can see the full transcript below. A few highlights of new or newish […]

PTR Patch 2.0 First Impressions: Round TwoThe majorly-updated version of Patch 2.2.0 hit the PTR last night, and there’s a lot of new stuff and most of it seems pretty awesome. The new goblins are now spawning, there’s a new Legendary Gem, heaps of Legendary items are buffed, most of the Item Sets are tweaked/improved, there are QoL improvements to auto-pickup, […]

Vote: Missed Diablo 3 Item Opportunities

I’m playing mostly Hardcore lately (my Monk is up to P6) and as a result, 1) I’m poor, 2) so I’m picking up damn near all of the Diablo 3 items drops to sell/salvage, and 3) which is reminding me what an incredible amount of junk rares the game spits out once you’re past level 60 and stacked up.

I find far more rares playing SC, where my mains have over 400% MF and very fast farming speeds, but in that mode I only pick up a tiny fraction of the yellow, so I’m sure I’ve missed some awesome stuff. In SC I only pause for jewelry and some ilvl 62/63 armors and 1H weapons, and not even those, all the time. In HC so far I’m picking up every Rare, since selling Iridescent Tears, ToS, and FS Amethysts is my main source of income. (They all sell for much more than they do in softcore, as we discussed at length on the last podcast). And so far, just going from P1-P6, with minimal MF other than the stacks, my HC Monk has already found 5 rares that were good enough to upgrade his own gear or to sell on the Auction House. And that’s more interesting since 3 of them were item types I’d *never* have picked up in SC. (Admittedly, only 1 or 2 of those rares would have had any value in SC.)

Thus I’m now wondering how many awesome rares I’ve zoomed right past in SC. Hence this vote question, which is obviously a hypothetical.

Imagine if Diablo 3 had some algorithm that would let it know when a “good” rare item was dropped (it could base it on similarity to items that have sold in the AH for above some price threshold that you set). Would you want to know? After 99% of games you’d get a pop up that said “You missed nothing!” But once in a while… once in a very long while… the pop up would tell you that you missed something. Maybe that ilvl 62 wand you blew right past in Arreat Crater 2 was a 99.93% quality roll and it had (for example) 1143 DPS, a socket, 85% CD, +134 INT, etc. On top of the item tool tip, the game helpfully tells you that similar wands are listed for 75-100m. Perhaps with an appropriate sound effect?)

Would you want to know that? Would you enable that option if it existed?

If that option existed, would you enable it? And how would you react if you got a hit? Desire to hurl your monitor through the window? New found careful and conscientious play style so as not to miss another one? (That should get a lot easier with the ID-all button in v1.08 and especially once the rare drop rates are turned down in v1.09).